STEVEN TUCKER
The current online petition calling for a (very) early General Election to take place here in the United Kingdom has already gained over 2.5 million signatures in under a week. Even though it is less than six months since the previous ballot, so disappointed are some impatient voters with the early conduct of Sir Keir Starmer’s new, dissenter-imprisoning, economy-trashing, farmer-killing Labour Government that they already want the nightmare over.
Were he a U.K. citizen, one eager signature on the list would surely be that of X chief Elon Musk, who on November 24th tweeted out his approving opinion of the petition: “The people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state.” What was it about life in Starmer’s Airstrip One that Musk found so very Orwellian? An earlier social media exchange of Musk’s explains:
The journalist mentioned being visited by the Thought Police of “Soviet Britain” here was of course Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who was questioned in her home by uniformed police earlier this month and accused of writing hurty words in an old and since long-forgotten tweet. This cautionary tale has already been covered in depth here on the Daily Sceptic. But now that it is (hopefully) finally all over, a fuller summary of the wider issues the whole debacle raised may be in order.
Self-Appointed Guardians
Following the October 7th attacks on Israel last year, Pearson has spent much of her time campaigning for pro-Jewish causes, even declaring herself to be “an honorary Jewish mother” during an online Q&A session with the Chairman of the U.K.’s National Jewish Assembly in November 2023. Also in November 2023, concerned by the militant, Jew-baiting nature of several pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas marches then taking place across the country, she posted a tweet which was to land her in hot water a full 12 months later.
Pearson had seemingly mistaken an image of two Muslims holding up the flag of an obscure (to an average British person) Pakistani political party for an image of two Muslims holding up the flag of Hamas or some similar anti-Jewish organisation. As the flag-wavers were pictured happily standing alongside grinning British bobbies, Pearson contrasted the apparent stance of the cops involved with that of officers on a separate pro-Israel march elsewhere, who had refused to pose for pics alongside a Star of David flag. Pearson thought she spied double standards at work here, asking why other officers had been perfectly happy to pose alongside the banner of what she incorrectly assumed was a violent Islamist outfit.
“How dare they,” she is alleged to have written, in a since dredged-up screenshot of what purports to be her old tweet. “Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday, police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.”
Once it was pointed out to her that the flag was not in fact the Hamas one, Pearson quickly took her post down. In other words, she made an innocent mistake, a simple factual error, which she soon amended, and you may have thought this would be the end of the matter. Not under the rule of the current Prime Sinister.
Absence of Evidence is Not Necessarily Evidence of Absence
One particular outraged, but safely unnamed, member of the public deemed Pearson’s tweet to be a kind of hate crime, which made him or her feel so very, very unsafe. Citizen X consulted not only with the police, but also Britain’s leading Left-wing newspaper the Guardian, pleading terrible concerns. Being “a former public servant with training in criminal law”, the complainant felt the post could be legally deemed “racist and inflammatory”, even though Pearson was clearly trying to condemn inflammatory anti-Jewish racial hatred herself.
“Each time an influential person makes negative comments about people of colour I, as a person of colour, see an uptick in racist abuse towards me and the days after that tweet are no different,” Citizen X added. A strange kind of causality that, though, isn’t it?
How, precisely, could the complainant accurately correlate any purported “uptick in racist abuse” that he (we’ll go with he) may have received in the days following Pearson’s post? Did the poor, maligned individual take the trouble to stop such troublemakers in the street and ask them, “Excuse me, sir, but are you only calling me a Taliban here today solely and directly because you happen to have logged onto Twitter on your phone this morning and briefly accessed an obscure and not terribly abusive message from a random broadsheet newspaper journalist during the very short time said tweet was actually still up and available to view there?”
If Citizen X had indeed bothered to ask this question, presumably the answer would have been: “No, I’m a fully independent freelance racist, I don’t take any direct instruction from employees of the Daily Telegraph whatsoever, why do you ask?” Sadly, though, any such hypothetical answer would no longer even matter. As regular Sceptic readers will know, British hate crime law these days is so loosely framed that any and all offence taken by a complainant is officially deemed to be very much in the eyes of the beholders, even if said eyes are as full of cataracts as the Nile.
Confronted with black-clad officers of Gestapo-GB on her doorstep, Pearson initially presumed (although Essex Police, the particular force responsible, says otherwise) that she was being charged with a Non-Crime Hate Incident (NCHI), a genuinely Kafkaesque class of non-crimes which police are supposed to investigate as if they are crimes anyway, even though they aren’t. The official guidance for officers investigating an NCHI reads thus: “The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required.”
Yes, you did read all that correctly. Predictably, the fact that evidence “is not required”, and that police “should not directly challenge” even the most manifestly loony and untrue potential assertion, has led to NCHIs becoming an absolute crank’s charter, with the more sceptical elements of the British media (i.e., definitely not the Guardian) engaging in an amusing competition following Pearson’s ordeal to dig out the most absurd and timewasting NCHI reports ever logged. (I’ve recently done the same thing myself here, too.)
Len Loves Men
For my money, the best was the Very Important Case of a man from Yorkshire who, during a minor dispute about hedge-trimming, was accused of “homophobic abuse” after calling his neighbour “Leonard”, when this was not in fact his name. It would seem that, unbeknownst to most British people, the term “Leonard” is a generic insult in the local area – but how, precisely, is it meant to be “homophobic”? Nobody really knows, but the best guess, from journalist Rod Liddle, is that, on September 8th 1975, Time Magazine ran with the following front cover:
That self-proclaimed homosexual in uniform there is an individual named Technical Sergeant Leonard Phillip Matlovitch, the first openly gay man ever to grace the cover of Time; hardly a household name here in the U.K., nor even very probably within his own household. And yet, during a humdrum suburban dispute over a hedge in Yorkshire, obviously this particular piece of incredibly obscure publishing information from 49 years ago came instantly into the mind of the accused, causing him to commit an egregious homophobic hate non-crime right there on the spot.
And, if any sceptical readers should happen to find this presumed chain of reasoning a little unlikely here, then please do remember that it really doesn’t matter: if the alleged “Leonard” concerned perceived it to be this way, then, according to the demented way U.K. law is currently framed, it must automatically be accepted by police as being so, even though anyone half-normal can see it quite obviously isn’t. Truly, this is the logic of the witch-hunt. If you called Leonard Matlovitch himself Leonard, as that was actually his name, would that be a hate crime too? What about calling Leonard Rossiter Leonard Rossiter? Or Leonard Cohen Leonard Cohen?
Other instances of laughable racially and sexually motivated NCHIs on record (see here and here) include the following:
- A man who claimed to have received a “rough haircut” because his barber heard him speaking Russian.
- A German lady deeply offended at being compared to a Rottweiler.
- A woman whose hair was laughed at in the street due to its length (excessively long, or excessively short, we are not told).
- A man who heard the theme tune to the children’s TV show Bob the Builder being whistled in his presence, in an act of purest “racial hatred”.
- A child being “allowed” to bump his head in a swimming pool by an instructor purely on account of “his ethnicity”.
- A homosexual being “ripped off” financially by his local drug dealer because of “his sexuality”.
- A Portuguese man finding a burger van “deliberately” parked on his driveway by “an unknown person” one day, in an exceedingly oblique reference to “their ethnicity”.
That’s just how the Nazis started, isn’t it? One day the Jews of Germany were safe and happy, the next day a chosen rabbi woke up to find a small Volkswagen full of bratwursts parked on his driveway by Heinrich Himmler. As shown on this site previously, this is the actual stated logic behind NCHIs: as justification for enforcing them, police cite a dubious so-called “Pyramid of Hate” diagram, which begins at the base with seemingly harmless “microaggressions” like poorly parked fast-food vehicles, and quite literally ends with the gas-chambers of Auschwitz.
Surely if NCHIs have any genuine valid practical merit to them at all, it’s purely as a quick and easy clinical means of psychiatrists diagnosing states of extreme paranoia amongst all those who actually bother to file the damn things.
I Hate Hate Crimes – Is That a Hate Crime?
Mercifully, as Non-Crime Hate Incidents are not actually crimes – the clue’s in the name – you can’t yet be prosecuted or sent to prison for “committing” them (the particular status of that word “committed” there being a true ontological puzzle, by the way). So, some blasé commentators (no doubt mainly Left-wing, or else oversensitive Muslim ones, who happen to innately disapprove of Pearson’s tweet in the first place), adopt the dismissive attitude that “Oh, what’s all the fuss about? She didn’t end up chewing porridge for 10 years behind bars, did she?” No, but:
- The process of investigation, being time-consuming, public and highly embarrassing, is in itself a form of open-ended punishment without trial.
- It is a complete waste of police time, effort and money in a country in which, or so I believe from the newspapers, it is still occasionally possible for a person to get mugged, raped, murdered or stabbed in the street.
- NCHIs can still be recorded on the permanent criminal records of ‘offenders’, even though they are not actually crimes, and can remain visible to future employers etc., as another form of blatant extrajudicial punishment.
- Essex Police say Pearson wasn’t being investigated for an NCHI at all, but a full blown hate crime, which can entail actual criminal prosecution, fines, prison terms etc. for those found guilty of them.
Thankfully, in the end Essex Police ended up dropping all charges, possibly put off by the massive media outcry. Less thankfully, this very fact then allows some commentators to thereafter sit back and airily claim free speech is not under assault in such cases at all, oh no.
A typically disingenuous op-ed piece by the absolute Leonards at the Guardian about the whole affair, for example, was headlined ‘Anatomy of a non-scandal: the defence of Allison Pearson reveals how “free speech” has been weaponised‘; do please note how the words “free speech” have inverted commas around them there, as should the word ‘newspaper’ whenever used in relation to the Guardian.
Here, journalist Jane Martinson, who only ever tweets unobjectionable images of cuddly kittens, big pink love-hearts and cute smiling babies, argues as follows. Whilst inevitably claiming to support free speech, as it is “a human right, fundamental to our democracy”, Martinson simultaneously claims that “To hold this opinion – that racists and misogynists should not have carte blanche to say what they like under the banner of free speech – does not make me part of cancel culture, but rather of a civilised one.” Or, to put it another way, “I don’t believe in free speech, I just don’t want to openly admit it.”
Neither, some may suspect, does whoever it was who snitched on Allison Pearson in the first place. Citizen X told the Guardian that: “This is not a debate about free speech; this is about a journalist who tweeted something false during the height of the tensions in London [at pro-Palestine marches] following the October 7th atrocities. She could have tweeted an apology stating she was wrong. She didn’t.” No, she just deleted it immediately instead.
Free speech may not include the right to say actively false things on purpose, but some may say that it sounds more like what certain people were truly objecting to here was actually Pearson’s opinion that some Muslims in Britain, albeit not those in her mistakenly tweeted photo, might indeed just be, as she put it, “Jew haters” – which, quite demonstrably, at least some of them are.
Whilst Pearson’s “person of colour” accuser told the Guardian he or she wasn’t actually a Muslim, I am guessing he or she may have been easily mistaken for one in the street. But, according to figures released to mark one year since Hamas’s October 7th 2023 attacks, there has been a record subsequent rise in reported anti-religious hate crimes across the UK, mainly against Jews and Muslims. In the summary of the BBC: “The spike in such incidents coincided with the start of the conflict in the Middle East, and though the number decreased, by the spring it had not returned to levels identified before the conflict.”
All things considered, is it not far more likely that any abuse allegedly aimed at Citizen X in the days following Pearson’s old tweet – i.e., around a month or so after the Hamas attacks, when feelings were still running extremely high – was simply generically related to wider prevailing tensions in the Middle East then spilling out onto U.K. streets, as opposed to Pearson’s online followers suddenly deciding to form public hate-mobs against passing presumed brown-skinned “Jew haters” for no good reason?
A Simple Twist of Hate
But, as already indicated, all this does not matter. Under current U.K. legal guidance, it is not only NCHIs but also full-blown actual hate crimes which are entirely within the eye (or lie) of the beholder. Again, here is the official online definition from Britain’s top force, the Metropolitan Police, of what a “hate crime” supposedly is (i.e., absolutely anything you want it to be):
Why does the law continue to be drafted and phrased so insanely loosely? As Freddie Attenborough, of the Free Speech Union, which helped defend Pearson during her ordeal, put it in a column about the increasing use of NCHIs earlier this year: “It’s as if this [current Labour Party] Government really, really hates free speech, but doesn’t want to legislate against it because it knows that would be unpopular so it’s trying to erode it in sneaky ways behind the scenes.” Quite successfully so, it would appear.
Ultimately, nothing happened to Allison Pearson, in the specific sense that she was not brought up before a literal judge and jury, before then being tried, fined, imprisoned, whipped, beheaded etc. Rightfully, no charges ended up being pressed against the poor lady whatsoever. But ordinary members of the public, seeing the headlines about what happened to Pearson and not paying overly much attention amidst their busy everyday lives, will likely have gained one impression overall: that saying the wrong thing in public in the United Kingdom about sensitive subjects like Islam these days can get you in trouble with the law in some ill-defined fashion or other. They might not be not quite sure how, but that’s the basic way it appears to be, nonetheless.
And what will the consequent result of such a (in fact not wholly true) belief be upon their probable future behaviour? To increasingly make them keep their big mouths shut and self-censor. In other words, freedom of speech in Britain will become yet further eroded, as Elon Musk correctly warned – without any embarrassingly explicit legislation being needed to ensure this intended outcome.
Thus, thanks to “tyrannical police state” nonsenses like NCHIs, those who want to censor us into silence about contentious topics like Islam, mass immigration, transgenderism, Leonards, etc. etc., can disingenuously now do so whilst simultaneously claiming they are really not doing so at all.
That’s how I personally perceive the matter to currently stand myself, anyway: and, according to the pathetic logic of current UK NCHI and hate crime laws, how I perceive such things to be is all that really matters here, isn’t it? And, if you dare disagree, I’ll call up the police and report it as a hate crime.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
This article (For Britain’s Thought Police the Allison Pearson Fiasco Achieved its Purpose: Turning Up the Fear) was created and published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Steven Tucker
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